Shhh! HP's cloud is called, er, Scalene

'Our cloud is like a wompus triangle'

Common Topics

Exclusive Hewlett-Packard's as-yet-unannounced cloud will likely be known as HP Scalene, according to a recent trademark filing and domain registration.

Apparently, HP is naming its cloud after a triangle. Or a neck muscle. Or a small ridge on your first rib. But the company spokesperson declined to comment on the moniker.

In March, at an event in San Francisco, HP CEO Léo Apotheker said that the company would offer both an Amazon-like "infrastructure cloud" (an online service that provides access to readily scalable computing resources, including processing power) as well as a "platform cloud" (for building, hosting, and scaling applications without having to juggle raw resources). These services, it seems, will together bear the burden of the Scalene name. It kinda sounds like scale, you see. But it doesn't.

According to information since removed from the profile, HP's infrastructure cloud will offer processing power, block storage, object storage, and networking, and its platform cloud will play nice with Java, Ruby, and "other open source languages". HP, it seems, was planning to reveal at least some of these services at VMware's VMworld show this August.

HP has registered the scalene.com domain here. And the trademark filing is here. The filing says that Scalene will be used for "Computer hardware; computer software for cloud computing" and "computer hardware and software consulting and computing services, namely, acting as a consultant or service provider in the field of cloud computing."

Judging from McClellan's LinkedIn profile, the HP Cloud Services group will not offer a platform cloud based on Microsoft's Azure platform, although it's possible this could still arrive from another group within HP. Last year, Microsoft announced that HP, Dell, and Fujitsu would offer platform clouds using appliances based on Redmond's Azure cloud. But these were supposed to arrive by the end of last year, and none have yet seen the light of day.

Dell is also building an infrastructure cloud, and this will presumably be based on OpenStack, the open source cloud-building project founded by NASA and Rackspace.

It appears that HP's Cloud Services unit is in the midst of a shakeup. Zorawar "Biri" Singh, who served as vice president of cloud computing at IBM, has left Big Blue and is now running the new HP unit. His Twitter account seemed to indicate he had moved to HP – unless you work for HP, you're unlikely to retweet industry analyst Rob Enderle telling the world how HP can "win in mobile" – and the company has confirmed that he is now the company's senior vice president for cloud services.

According to another LinkedIn profile, vice president of technical operations Richard Cunningham is leaving the company, and considering the recent updates to his profile, we wouldn't be surprised if McClellan is leaving as well. ®